Injuries to operators of power tools such as power saws, grinders and sanders are common. Such injuries occur either directly through contacting a part of the operator's body with the cutting blade or abrasive surface, or by the operator's clothing becoming entangled in the power machinery.
Armoured safety workwear employing metal chain, mesh or metal plates has been available in the prior art for protection of power tool operators, but such workwear has a number of disadvantages.
For example U.S. Pat. No. 4,766,612 discloses a protective work glove that uses stiff, metal bars which are removably insertable into cavities along the back of each finger of the glove. However, as the glove is principally designed to protect the hand from mashing or crushing type injuries, it is not sufficiently flexible to be useful as a work glove for operating power tools. U.S. Pat. No. 2,862,208 discloses another protective glove intended for use by industrial and agricultural workers to protect against cutting by a tool blade. Metal chains are inserted into passages extending along the back of the index and middle finger and around the thumb of the glove. While such chains are more flexible than metal bands, such chains are heavy, particularly, if used in a number of pieces of the wearer's clothing, and this glove does not allow for easy installation and replacement of the metal chains.
A third safety glove for protection against cutting blades is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 2,737,663. It comprises a skeleton frame-work of protective straps, certain of which are stretchable to permit flexing of the wearer's hand. The flexible straps are formed of a series of interconnected tubes, presumably metal, joined in the interior of the tubes by coil springs. The coil springs provide a resilient rather than protective function. Such a glove is clearly difficult and expensive to manufacture. U.S. Pat. No. 1,574,188 discloses a bulletproof vest. Strips of aluminum alloy are held in overlapping relationship in pockets sewn in the vest. Again this construction is too heavy and inflexible to be useful for protective gloves and the like for power tool operators.
The various prior art articles of protective clothing suffer from a number of problems, whether excessive weight, lack of flexibility, or expense of manufacture. The prior art articles which employ chains and circular straps as armour in gloves were principally designed to protect the wearer's hand from knife edges which cut by slicing with a sharp straight edge. Such articles offer inadequate protection against the hardened, high-speed teeth of modern power tools. Further, in many cases the design of the protective clothing is such that it may become entangled in the rotating machinery causing injury to the operator.
It is therefore an object of this invention to provide improved lightweight and flexible protective clothing to reduce injury to the wearer from power tool accidents. It is another object of this invention to provide novel protective clothing which uses common cylindrical coil springs as its armour to help protect the wearer. Still other objects can be found in the more detailed description which follows.